Passthrough: Standardizing Private Fund Onboarding
Tim Flannery, co-founder of Passthrough, on building TurboTax for private fund investing
The real wedge is not digitizing forms, it is becoming the system that already knows who an investor is everywhere private capital changes hands. In private funds, the same person or entity keeps re entering name, entity, accreditation, tax, and banking details into PDFs, emails, and portals, then lawyers, admins, and wealth teams retype and reconcile it again. Passthrough starts at subscription documents because that is the first formal moment investor identity gets captured in a reusable way.
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The inefficiency is not limited to fundraising. Once a fund closes, the same investor data has to drive allocations, NAV reporting, K-1s or 1099s, fee calculations, and document delivery. iCapital describes this as a chain of structured data maintenance and reconciliation across GPs, tax providers, admins, and wealth managers.
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The strategic contrast is standardization versus endless custom work. Passthrough turns each law firm's existing subscription package into a guided workflow, while Sydecar standardizes SPV formation and admin around one operating model. Both are trying to replace email, PDFs, and one off exceptions with repeatable rails.
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A useful parallel is Addepar. It won by taking messy statements, PDFs, and fund reports and turning them into one portfolio dashboard for RIAs and family offices. Passthrough is earlier in the workflow, structuring the identity and onboarding data before those downstream reporting systems ever receive it.
The market is heading toward a shared identity and data layer for private assets. The winners will be the companies that turn one time investor onboarding into permissioned data that can move into fund admin, wealth management, tax, and eventually secondary trading without being re entered each time.